Hitachi Storage Virtualization Resource Center - Hitachi Data Systems

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Hitachi Virtualization Resource Center

Virtualization Resource Center

Overview

Storage Virtualization Gets Real

Your data center has a hidden resource. All that unused storage space, in all your heterogeneous systems. Systems you deployed tactically, each topped off with extra space—up to 75 percent of it—that you had to buy but never got to use.

Now you can use it. Hitachi Storage Virtualization lets you tap that hidden resource that's lying fallow in your multi-vendor environment. Based on our Universal Storage Platform™ systems, our unique virtualization capability masks complexity and presents all your heterogeneous storage capacity as a single pool that you can control and optimize simply and centrally, using one powerful suite of management tools.

What you get is the basis for a sustainable storage architecture. One that protects, grows, and lasts.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization - Gartner rates Hitachi a Strong Positive

Gartner Rates Hitachi a "Strong Positive"

Gartner rates Hitachi a "strong positive" based on the "strength of the maturity and desirability of its feature set (particularly virtualization, thin provisioning and SATA drive support)...recent product enhancements, and its strong focus on the heterogeneous high-end enterprise storage market.

MarketScope for High-End Enterprise Disk Arrays, September 2008

Press Release

Gartner Report

 

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Perspectives
Resources

Resources

Whitepapers

Media

Download Virtualization 101 Resource KitDownload Storage Economics

 

Enterprise Virtualization: Making It a Reality

Enterprise Virtualization: Making It a RealityAugust 8, 2007 - Hu Yoshida of Hitachi Data Systems explains how organizations are aggressively moving forward to make their IT dynamic by introducing virtualization to their server, storage, application, and desktop environments. How are we planning for this? What are our specific goals and priorities? Given that we are touching almost all areas of Enterprise IT at the same time, are we setting ourselves up for failure?

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Hitachi Basic Operating System Flash Demo

Hitachi Basic Operating System Flash DemoAre you having trouble keeping ahead of your growing storage requirements? The Hitachi Basic Operating System for the Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM simplifies storage management. With an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), it provides user, logical, physical and host management that enables provisioning and storage pooling for primary and secondary storage. Download

Hitachi Universal Volume Manager

Hitachi Universal Volume Manager

Virtualization can help organizations reduce costs by letting them more efficiently use the storage resources and simplifying the management of their environment. Watch the demo and see how Hitachi Universal Volume Manager can help you keep your costs down!
Watch | Download

 

Analyst Reports

Success Stories & Case Studies

 

Attend a WebTech session to optimize or start designing your economically, ecologically superior architecture today. The Hitachi WebTech Series is Designed for the Hands-On Technical Expert
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Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Why Virtualize
Sustain

Why Virtualize

Why VirtualizeImplementing Virtualization enables you to Sustain, Save and Grow efficiently to ensure an effective pathway to a brighter storage future.

 

Sustain

Virtualization addresses the growing pains of unsustainable, legacy storage architectures:

 

  • Cost and Efficiency – You can't keep throwing more storage as point solutions for each user or business need. You need to balance high business demands with low budgets, contain costs, and "do more with less". Virtualization helps you reclaim, utilize and optimize your storage assets.
  • Data and Technology Management – You have more and more data to manage, and you're dealing with a multi-vendor environment as a result of data growth and business change. It's time to rein in all those assets and manage them to drive your business.
  • Improve Customer Service – You're under pressure to meet SLAs, align IT with business strategy, and support users and customers. Virtualizing enables you to deliver storage in right-sized, right-performing slices—slices of what you have now, but weren't maximizing before.
  • Stay Competitive – Business is always looking for ways to be better, faster, cheaper. Hitachi Storage Virtualization increases business agility and lets you do more with less so that you can ramp up fast to meet changing business needs.
  • Enhance Performance – The best way you can support your users and customers is to improve speed and access to their data. Virtualizing gives new life to your existing infrastructure because it lets you optimize all your multi-vendor storage and match storage to application requirements.

The hardware, software, services and partnerships to do it are here, now. IT organizations are virtualizing with Hitachi because our solutions are field-tested, award winning and reliable, minimizing the risk of transforming their old, unsustainable storage architectures into a sustainable architecture.

Gartner rates Hitachi a "Strong Positive."

Sustainability

To us, sustainability is so much more than being green. It is a characteristic of a process or state of being that can be maintained, indefinitely. Hence, when we create products for Storage Virtualization, we create them in a way that helps our customers:

 

We are all about building virtual storage solutions that help our businesses take care of their concerns, while taking care of Mother Earth and the demand on its resources, all the while leaving a legacy of quality virtual storage solutions and relationships with the people that we serve on our planet.

 

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Save

Do More With What You've Got

Save

Do More With What You've Got

  • IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall data center power consumption. Hitachi Storage Virtualization solutions can help reduce energy and cooling costs by 30% - 50%.
  • An Emerson Power survey projects that 96% of all data centers will not have sufficient power by 2011. *Source: Emerson Press Release, November 16, 2006
  • Gartner predicts that by 2009, half of the world’s data centers will not have sufficient power to support their applications. *Source: "Gartner Says 50 Percent of Data Centers Will Have Insufficient Power and Cooling Capacity by 2008," Gartner Inc. Press Release, November 29, 2006

In our rough economic times, you need to justify IT spending by more sophisticated metrics than cost per megabyte. Metrics of capital expenses are no longer adequate because of the gigantic, hidden costs of management and maintenance.

 

Besides the explosion in routine operating expenses, you face the "stealth expense" of complying with industry and government regulations. Either you pay more now and meet standards—or risk getting fined for non-compliance.

 

Purchase price of a storage asset is generally only a third to a fifth of the total cost of ownership. At Hitachi, we've identified and characterized 32 different types of costs that can be used to baseline or track storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To move toward an economically and ecologically superior storage architecture, you should choose metrics that apply to your business and budget—and choose investments and strategies that directly impact cost areas.

 

Some places to examine efficiencies and look for savings include:

 

  • Power, cooling, and floorspace
  • Cost and effectiveness of labor
  • Cost of maintenance
  • Return on Assets (ROA) – how well you're utilizing your assets
  • Cost of growth
  • Cost of performance (meeting SLAs)

The Universal Storage Platform V™

Virtualization is a key enabler of strategies and solutions that can help you reclaim, utilize, and optimize storage space, and simplify storage management. It separates storage services from physical storage functions. Once you virtualize with Hitachi you can begin to manage all your storage with a common tool, lowering labor and maintenance costs. And, you can implement other "ingredients" that help you improve ROI and lower cost of performance and growth, such as tiered storage and thin provisioning.

Working with clients around the world, Hitachi has taken principles of Storage Economics to help create strategies, roadmaps, architectures, and solutions that actually reduce TCO.

Webcast

Watch the Webcast


Podcast

Listen to the Podcast


Whitepaper

Read the Whitepaper

 

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Growth

Grow

Grow

Data centers are running out of space, and energy costs are rising. Hitachi Data Systems offers a cost-effective, eco-friendly, and socially responsible approach to help IT manage the explosive data growth and cope with the need to simplify storage management and keep costs under control.
At Hitachi, we think of the path toward a sustainable storage architecture as a Storage Maturity Model. It's phased growth and phased improvement that starts with consolidating and virtualizing data on our Universal Storage Platform and gradually add more capabilities and more value.

  • Virtualization – You simplify the infrastructure and leverage Hitachi's common platform for storage management, business continuity, and services like NAS, Content Management, and Virtual Tape.
  • Data Mobility – To further inprove efficiencies you add tools like Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager, so that you can migrate data across tiers quickly, with less risk, lower operating costs, and better application uptime.
  • Policy-Based Automation – You've already aligned storage tiers to your business needs. Now you automate data movement across tiers so that it happens dynamically according to policies you create. For instance, if your Oracle application needs higher performance, your policy engine can automatically migrate the data to a higher tier so that you met SLAs. At this level of storage maturity, you'll be enjoying optimized performance, reduced infrastructure and management costs, and assured SLAs.
  • Content-Aware Information – This is the peak of storage maturity. Based on metadata, your applications are automatically provisioned and tiered to meet SLAs. You've achieved a totally self-healing, intelligent storage platform.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization can put your data center’s bottom line in the green, enabling you to do more with less. We can help you to grow and nurture the strong roots needed to stabilize your environment and preserve your data economically and ecologically.

The sustainable, economically and ecologically superior storage architecture.

  • Since 2000, the amount of corporate data generated worldwide has grown from 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) to over 300 exabytes, with projections of ~1 zetabyte (1000 exabytes) by 2010. *Source: 2007 - "A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010", IDC White Paper,
  • Transferring data to "the next technology" will cost you around $76,000 per terabyte. HDS Storage virtualization lets you take advantage of the features of new technology without physically moving the data.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Why Hitachi?

Leverage the Hitachi Advantage

Leverage the Hitachi Advantage

Virtualization Definition – Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)

  1. The act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal function of a storage (sub) system or service from applications, compute servers or general network
    resources for the purpose of enabling application and network independent management of storage or data.
  2. The application of virtualization to storage services or devices for the purpose of aggregating, hiding complexity, or adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Did You Know?

Did you know?

Hitachi has shipped 11,000+ Universal Storage Platforms and Network Storage Controller. More than 40% of them are being used for virtualization.

Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V named Highest Performing Storage System in Industry by Storage Performance Council. USP V achieved an aggregated avg of 8,724.67 SPC-2 MBPSTM with a single storage controller, surpassing the performance levels of competitor enterprise storage systems tested by eight fold.

Storage Economics is a proven, methodical and business focused approach leveraging more than 600 customer engagements.

Hitachi Data Systems has been using the economic storage sales model for more than 10 years, longer than competition.

Since 2000, the amount of corporate data generated worldwide has grown from 5 exabytes (5 billion GB) to over 300 exabytes, with projections of ~1 zetabyte (1000 exabytes) by 2010. - "A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010", IDC White Paper, 2007.

Hitachi estimates that up to 75% of an organizations current investment in storage is wasted. Reclaim that wasted space with Hitachi virtualization.

Storage today is only 20% - 30% utilized--and storage purchases are growing at a 60% CAGR.

Transferring data to “the next technology” will cost you around $76,000 per terabyte. HDS Storage virtualization lets you take advantage of the features of new technology without physically moving the data.

IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall data center power consumption1 HDS Storage Virtualization solutions can help reduce energy and cooling costs by 30% - 50%. “A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010”, IDC White Paper, March, 2007

An Emerson Power survey projects that 96% of all data centers will not have sufficient power by 2011. 2 2007 - “A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010”, IDC White Paper

HDS pioneered controller-based virtualization, a technology that separates storage controllers from the storage media in any type of environment. This architectural advance helps reduce power, cooling, and space requirements.

 

Imagine what would happen to a company’s property manager who left costly office space 75% unoccupied! Why should you do that with storage space, when it’s clearly both economically and ecologically unsound? No organization can afford to do that—that’s why we say that current storage architectures are unsustainable.

A new architecture built on controller-based virtualization is sustainable, because it’s economically and ecologically sound. Controller-based storage virtualization enables IT to use that single pool of multivendor storage to create different storage tiers and store application data in the appropriate tier based on performance and capacity. That means the whole pool of storage can be used optimally—the organization’s entire investment in storage assets is optimized.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Design

Manage Growth Skillfully

Manage Growth SkillfullyNo matter how much data you have to store and manage—no matter how complex your present multivendor storage environment—there's a new approach that makes things simpler. We call this approach Services Oriented Storage. In essence, it's the application of the principles of Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, concepts to storage.

You can adopt this approach now, starting with Hitachi's controller-based Storage Virtualization.

Virtualization is a key building block of your sustainable storage architecture, designed to enable and work with other components of a services oriented approach that can support your business at every turn, now and into the future.

  • Virtualization – Virtualization masks the inner workings of your storage systems—it hides complexity. While there are many virtualization technologies available, only Hitachi offers controller-based virtualization, which gives you extra flexibility. Our Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM systems let you virtualize and pool multi-vendor storage up to 247PB.
  • Tiered Storage Management – When you've pooled all your storage assets, you're no longer stuck with unusable storage space in standalone systems. Our Tiered Storage Manager software lets you easily and interactively match application QoS to your heterogeneous storage assets. Get more out of your assets and reinvigorate your existing storage environment.
  • Thin Provisioning – Overprovisioning is an expense you can no longer afford. Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software helps you increase utilization and lower your storage acquisition costs—you buy more only when physical space is full.
  • Common Management – With all your multivendor storage pooled and centrally managed using Hitachi Storage Command Suite, you'll be able to increase efficencies and scale up massively without adding extra administrators—handling growth just won't be the complex problem it used to be.

By implementing Hitachi Storage Virtualization, you can begin to adopt this approach now, reinvigorate and maximize your investments in existing assets and scale up at your own pace.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Solution Partners
VMware

VMware

VMware

Hitachi Data Systems and VMware are fully engaged to deliver industry leading solutions addressing end-to-end server to storage virtualization. VMware server technologies and Hitachi storage and software technologies offer powerful solutions with VMware for storage consolidation, backup and archiving, business continuity and storage management.

Hitachi Data Systems and VMware are engaged at all levels of interoperability testing and certifications, support and engineering to assure timely and broad qualification and certifications for our mutual customers.

 

 

 

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

 
Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

Hitachi Data System's prioritizes Microsoft as a key alliance partner and provides mutual customers the optimal storage environment for their Windows based solutions. Hitachi Data Systems is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and offers a complete array of engineered and integrated solutions optimized for the Microsoft application environments. The Hitachi Data Systems objective for the alliance with Microsoft is to build tightly integrated storage solutions complementing the Windows environment, and enable customers of all sizes to implement scalable, available and reliable architectures in a cost effective way.

Hitachi Data Systems, in collaboration with Microsoft and other partners develop solutions for the Hitachi lines of storage and management software to help customers take full advantage of their Microsoft Windows environments. These solutions ensure seamless support of Windows, helping any organization—from the smallest to the largest enterprise—reduce the cost and complexity of running their business.

We combine our strengths as industry leader to understand the evolving needs of our customers and provide enterprise-quality, cost-effective storage solutions for Microsoft Windows environments.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

 
Oracle

Oracle

Oracle

Oracle, Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems have a collaborative alliance that leverages their combined leadership in enterprise-class storage solutions and Internet-enabled databases and applications. This partnership covers a full spectrum of cooperative technology, service and support, and marketing and sales efforts.

 

Together, we deliver true end-to-end, integrated solutions that meet customers' business-critical information management needs. As members of all Oracle's key storage initiatives, we work closely to make sure that our Hitachi Freedom Storage™ systems and Freedom Storage Software™ are integrated with Oracle information management software.
"Today’s enterprises search for backup solutions that are high in quality and cost-effective. In answer to these requirements, Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi, Ltd., have tested and evaluated best practices for using Automatic Storage Management (ASM), a new feature introduced in Oracle Database 10g, to simplify Oracle database file administration on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ family of products while optimizing performance." - An application brief from Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle.

 

Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Reclaim, Utilize, Optimize.

Gte Virtual

You want to build a brighter future for your data center with Hitachi Storage Virtualization. Here's how to get started.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization







Download Virtualization 101 Resource Kit Download Storage Economics

 
 
 
 
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